Epilogue
NELL
Six months later.
I am absolutely gone on this man. Not a complaint.
A woman I've never seen before pushes through the door. Curvy, dark-haired, wrong boots, recorder in one hand and notebook in the other. She walks up to the bar like she's done this in a hundred towns.
"Hi," she says to Dottie. "I'm Cleo. I called about the profile?"
Dottie gives her the same slow look I got on my first day. Then her mouth twitches. "Sit down, honey."
Cleo sits, sets up her recorder, and starts asking questions that are better than they have any right to be. I go back to my laptop. Good for her.
Mace comes through the door.
His jacket is half-zipped. In six months I have never seen that. Mace does not leave the base half-dressed.
"Road's going to close tonight," he says to Dottie, like Cleo isn't sitting right there. "She needs to know."
"She's right there," Dottie says.
Mace turns, and for the first time in six months, the loudest man in Harrow Peak loses his voice.
Cleo puts her recorder down. "Hello to you too."
He recovers. Barely. Tells her she has two hours to leave before the road closes. Cleo looks at him — this enormous man filling the doorway with weather warnings and a half-zipped jacket — and turns back to Dottie.
"I'd like to check into my room now."
She doesn't look at him. Dottie is already reaching for the key.
He leaves. The door shuts hard behind him.
Dottie catches my eye over the bar. I've lived here long enough to read this town's silences, and this one is deafening.
Here we go.
The End
Cleo came to Harrow Peak for a story.
She had no idea she'd become one.
Read Cleo's Mountain Man